O Jerusalem

due to make a speech of brotherhood in less than two hours. Holmes shone the light into every cranny, even pushed at rocks that might possibly conceal the dynamite, thinking it possible that the site for the bomb was here, but there was nothing.

On into the dark we pressed, torn between urgency and caution, between the need for light and the danger of discovery, forty yards, twenty (Holmes had the pistol in one hand now, the torch in the other), and then with a shock like an internal explosion we were looking at the end of the tunnel, where the walls bulged out into a small circular room. There was nothing there.

Until we took two steps into the room, and saw the hole in the floor, and what it held.

An explosive reaction is a curious business. Set loose on an open hillside, a charge will billow out in roughly equal proportions on all sides, and quickly dissipate. Confined, for example inside a gun barrel, all its energy is forced to find release in a single direction, and is thereby vastly magnified.

This man knew his explosives. Karim Bey had burrowed laboriously down into the rock floor of the chamber to direct his charge. He had then piled heavy slabs of rock high around the edges of his hole, shaping them to focus the blast directly upwards. Without that preparation, the explosive force would have shaken the Dome, stripped it of its mosaic tiles, and perhaps even weakened it enough to bring it down. With it, Holmes’ vision of the sacred Rock popping into the air like a champagne cork was all too vividly possible.

I lit the lamp and hung it from a nail that probably had been put in the wall for that purpose, and when I turned, Holmes was lying on the stones, his upper half suspended over the mechanism as his fingers traced diagrams over the tangle of wires below, trying to sort out what went where. I took the torch from him, directing it to where his fingers pointed. The clock hand that would trigger the thing was alarmingly close to its mark, and I tried to comfort my racing heart by telling myself that Bey would have used only a high-quality clock, one that would be quite accurate. In truth, though, it was just as comforting to know that a prayer here was said to be worth a thousand elsewhere.

After several thousand of my fervent prayers, Holmes sat up and took out his pipe. The burning lamp in the corner was bad enough, but his flaring match made my stomach turn to ice.

“Shall we go for Ali? Mahmoud said he could handle bombs.”

“No need, this is quite simple,” he said calmly. “There do not seem to be any tricks. I don’t imagine Bey thought we would ever get this close.” Holmes set his pipe between his teeth and pawed through the bag, coming up with a little cloth bundle of tools which he untied and let unroll on a flattish rock to one side of the hole. He selected a small pair of snips from one of the bundle’s pockets. Holding these in his right hand, he set his pipe down, then stretched out on his stomach over the heap of stone, his head in the hole and his feet sticking into the tunnel. He flexed the snips a few times as if to warm up an instrument, and I shifted around to ensure that the light from the torch fell directly on his work. Extending both hands out over the bomb, he began delicately teasing at the wires with the fingers of his left hand. When the wire he sought was free, he adjusted his right hand on the snips and began to move them over to the mechanism, and with that came three sharp cracks directly over our heads.

I nearly dropped the torch; Holmes nearly closed the snips convulsively on the wrong wire: either would have been equally catastrophic. I gave a startled curse and stared upward, Holmes shuddered once with the effort of not reacting, and nothing else happened.

Slowly he drew back his hands and dropped his face into the crook of his left sleeve to rub the sweat out of his eyes.

“It’s a guide in the small cave beneath the Rock,” he said in an uneven voice, and cleared his throat. “They pound on the floor like that to demonstrate the hollow sound.”

“Bloody hell.” My own voice was none too steady. “Are they going to do it again?”

“Not until the next tour.” He took a deep breath, wiped his eyes again, and extended himself once more over the two and a half hundredweight of dynamite. His hands went still for a moment as he focussed, then he picked up the wire and cut it. As simple as that.

I began to breathe again. Holmes snipped and folded wires back, carefully removed the two detonators that, under the impetus of the clock’s alarm hand, would have set off the explosion, and carried them down the tunnel. He came back and lowered himself onto the floor, resting his head back against the wall.

“I’m getting too old for this,” he said after a while.

“When I take off this turban, my hair will be white,” I said in agreement.

“I’ve lost track of the time,” he said, a considerable admission.

I took out the old silver pocket-watch I always carried. “It’s twelve-fourteen.”

“Can we reach Mahmoud in sixteen minutes?”

“We can try.”

“That’s the spirit,” he said, half mockingly.

While Holmes swept the tools into his bag, I retrieved the lamp and then, feeling a little self-conscious, held it up so as to illuminate all the corners of the small enclosure, just in case. But there was no sign of the Ark of the Covenant, hidden deep below the sacred Rock, no indication in fact that anyone had ever been here other than Karim Bey or his accomplices. I followed my partner as fast as we could go down the slippery stones, across the moribund aqueduct and on down the tunnel to the hole in the roof that led into the Cotton Bazaar. The door set into the access hole was neither locked nor actually a door, merely a square of blackened wood, which Holmes lifted easily from below and inched gently across the floor of the house above us.

Holmes prepared to boost me up, then he paused and handed me the revolver. “They may have left a guard in the house. Be as silent as you can.”

I tucked the gun into my belt, put my booted toe into his joined hands, and was heaved up and effortlessly through the hole. I rolled instantly to one side; there was no response from the room. Taking the faltering torch from the inner pocket of my abayya, I looked around the filth of centuries that occupied the cellar, and spotted a ladder. I lowered it for Holmes, and once he was inside we brought it back up and put the covering back into place.

The house appeared empty. We picked our way up the worn stone steps, thick with the dribblings of the soil from the tunnel, and up above ground for the first time that day, into blessed daylight—though not much of it, given the architecture.

The actual door of the house was boarded over, but the windows, directly under which lay the oft-replenished piles of rubble I and the others had worked to clear, were neither glazed nor shuttered. The souk was empty of diggers today, as the soldiers took up more urgent duties elsewhere.

“Two of us in our current condition would be remarkable in the streets,” commented Holmes. “Do you wish to go for Mahmoud, or shall I?”

“I’ll go.”

I delayed my departure for thirty seconds to beat some of the encrusted mud from my robe and turn my abayya right side to, while Holmes searched for a marginally cleaner fold of the turban to pull over the rest. I went through the window, nearly bringing the rotten frame down with me, and into the pile of earth. Trailing clods of soil, I trotted away, and at the appointed corner found both Ali and Mahmoud, looking very tense. I slowed to a stroll, and as I allowed them to goggle at my condition I felt a grin grow, out of control and cracking the dirt across my face. “Amir!” exclaimed Ali. “What in the name of—”

“Are you injured?” interrupted Mahmoud. “Where is Holmes?”

“We are both fine,” I replied, and when I came up to them I added quietly in English, “The bomb is defused. You may tell General Allenby he should proceed.”

“By Allah, you cut that close,” said Ali. “Where will you be?”

“Down the Souk el-Qattanin,” I answered, and he turned and sprinted off into the bazaar.

TWENTY-SEVEN

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